VIDEO: When medicines are as individual as you are

In the past, drugs were mostly chemical compounds, and testing them meant giving them to lots of patients to make sure they worked the same way in everybody. Now, according to the Food and Drug Administration's new commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, we're on the cusp of an era when "medicines" could be built specifically to attack the disease-causing genes in an individual's body. This means that in the future, critical medicines will no longer be "one size fits all," but developed for specific individuals with specific diseases.

How do you test such individualized medicines to ensure they will work? Can the FDA adapt to this new era? In an exclusive interview with POLITICO, Gottlieb talks about the promise of gene therapies, the challenge of regulating them, and the potential concerns he has about how drug development will change in the future.